Anthony Pompliano - How To Live An Extraordinary Life: Keys To Fulfillment & Financial Freedom

Full transcript: Anthony Pompliano on London Real

3:44 Brian Rose: This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Anthony Pompliano, the entrepreneur, investor, Bitcoin advocate and author. You are the founder and CEO of Professional Capital Management and have built and sold many successful businesses and invested in over 200 companies. You are the host of the Pomp Podcast where you discuss technology and economics with a wide range of leading experts And your new book, How to Live an Extraordinary Life is a series of 65 letters written to your children explaining how to succeed in business, have great relationships and live a healthy and happy life.

4:20 You have argued that central banks are now flooding economies with large amounts of capital, which will lead to the devaluation of the dollar and other Fiat currencies while simultaneously boosting digital asset prices. You have called Bitcoin gold with wings and ultimately believe that true wealth and financial freedom come from finding and holding high quality assets forever. Anthony, welcome to London Real

4:45 Anthony Pompliano: thank. You so much for having me, Brian.

4:47 Brian Rose: Look, it’s great to have you here.

4:49 I’ve been watching your content for years and looking forward to talking about the book as well. I guess first I wanted to ask, since you’re in the States, how do things feel there? How important in your opinion is this election to crypto and blockchain and and maybe even finance in general?

5:08 Anthony Pompliano: Yeah. You know, I think that politics is very unique in that everyone cares about it.

5:13 But if you look in their day-to-day lives, it’s very hard to see where it shows up. And I’ll give you a couple of examples. You know, housing affordability in the United States right now is atrocious. It’s some of the worst it’s been in 40 or 50 years. The federal government actually can’t do that much to solve the problem. It’s much more reliant on your local City Council or your local government.

5:33 And so things like regulation are standing in the way, but the federal government doesn’t actually have oversight on that. And so I joke sometimes and I say, who’s on the City Council maybe more important than who’s in the White House? And so I do think that some of that is playing into it, but also if you look at the two candidates, these two candidates or much more similar than maybe people would recognise on its face, they obviously have different policies, but their approach to this election is very similar.

6:00 What I mean by that is they’re both populist candidates. So they’re going after the same exact audience. They’re trying to convince that kind of independent voter base or undecided voter base to sway. They have very specific tax cut policies. You know, usually it’s the Republicans, they get labelled as trying to use tax cuts.

6:17 But the Democrats in this election in particular, they’re trying to do a 25,000, you know, first time homebuyer help. They’re doing a $6000 child tax credit. They’re looking for a $50,000 tax benefit for small business owners. So tax cuts is this huge thing and it’s going after from a populist perspective. On top of that, they actually agree on way more than I think we thought they would agree on at the beginning of this.

6:39 They both want a southern border wall now. They both want no tax on tips. And so you kind of see this playing out in what you realise is, OK, that’s policy related. Their approach in terms of going on podcast, you know, watching Donald Trump talk to Theo Von about cocaine obviously goes super viral. And then you watch Kamala Harris talk to Alex Cooper on Call Her Daddy and that goes super viral.

7:02 And So what I’ve taken away from this entire election cycle is the world has changed. You know, this is not our grandparents politics anymore. This is not a kind of traditional appointment viewing television that we live in. And so instead, it’s, you know, shows like yours, it’s various podcasts. It’s social media that is really driving the conversation. And so when you are engulfed in that world, everything feels fast.

7:25 But you have to remember that, you know, it was less than four years ago Donald Trump was in the White House. Less than four years ago, Joe Biden took over. Less than four years ago was the global pandemic that literally locked people at home, both the United States and abroad. And so a lot of stuff can change in a very short period of time. When you think of it from an investing perspective, how do you just ignore a lot of that noise and realise that sometimes the best thing to do is just do nothing, you know, kind of make your bets, hold them for a long time.

7:54 And so I think that is the, you know, kind of challenge of our generation is how do you stay informed on current events but avoid going crazy? I got a lot of friends who became insane, you know, paying attention to all the politics. And, and I think that’s really where, you know, kind of we’re headed now is you want to know what’s going on, but also how do you not let it affect you? You know, politics has changed so much. You know, when I was a kid, or maybe when you were a kid, where, you know, it wasn’t as newsworthy. It wasn’t in our social media.

8:20 It wasn’t entertainment. You know, it was something that would happen every now and then. You know, I kind of remember the Ross Perot debate. I remember little bits here and there, but it wasn’t, it wasn’t something that really qualified as entertainment. It wouldn’t infect people’s heads, but now it really is placed there.

8:35 Brian Rose: Some people say that we kind of project on our politicians that they’re going to solve all our problems, and maybe you kind of alluded to that with the fact that maybe it has a lot more to do with local politics and maybe even yourself with your own actions. Do you think that it has become something that it really isn’t as far as entertainment and maybe a solution to all your problems?

8:57 Anthony Pompliano: Yeah, there’s a lot to unpack here. And I think, you know, maybe the first thing is I literally wrote a book specifically talking about all these different life lessons. But if I had to sum up one common thread, it’s that people have agency.

9:10 You get to do the things that you decide to do. And so whether that is, you know, concepts like luck not being real or hard work being important, it’s all about you having the agency. Now, why do people not feel like that is, you know, kind of the path forward? It’s because everything around them, the kind of digital environment, is telling them you’re not in control. We are going to tell you what to do.

9:33 We are going to programme your mind. We are going to show you how bad the world is. You know, the best point in history to live is in the future. The second best time to live is today. And I constantly remind people that we live in the safest, most prosperous time in human history. Today.

9:50 It doesn’t feel like that when you read the Internet or you watch TV or, or you, you know, look at what the newspapers are writing. And so that agency gets sucked out of people’s brains. And instead we start to say who is coming to save me? And so if you look at the United States specifically, we have become much more of a welfare, a welfare state than we previously were. You see that not old people. I mean, people expect in different nation states for older people to become dependent on the government. They run out of money, they don’t have retirement savings, you know, all these kind of social safety net programmes. We also expect maybe, you know, the people who are in the most dire situations among us, homeless people in poverty, etcetera.

10:30 They begin to depend on the state in the United States of America, there are people who are young, healthy, who should be productive. They’re depending on the on the nation state. And so anytime that you get a situation where people who should be productive, who should actually be creating their own income, who should be, you know, doing things to society, they become part of that welfare state. You have to ask one, what is the psychological, you know, kind of development that got us to that point where they think it’s OK and they’re actually looking for the handout. But then 2 is what’s happened in the government where we’re actually handing this money out.

11:05 And so I think that the United States is, you know, kind of following the classic trajectory of a nation state who we have the position of luxury where things like depression, things like welfare state, all have become the norm. And I always point back and, you know, I saw this clip of $0.50 talking about depression being a luxury, and it’s just seared in my brain. He said, where I come from, we don’t have the luxury of being depressed. Everyone is so focused on what is the next thing that I have to do to get food on the table so my kids can eat tonight.

11:42 And again, I didn’t grow up in that environment. And so it’s hard for me to understand exactly what he’s talking about on a day-to-day basis. But this idea that as a country in the United States, we are so fortunate, we we’re so prosperous, that people can stand around and complain about stupid things, Go back 100 years. We didn’t have that luxury. People had to work. And so in a weird way, our success is actually beginning to kind of collapse on itself and lead to some of the absurdity that we see in the media.

12:14 Brian Rose: Yeah, there’s a great line from the book where you say the best response to failure is hard work. And I’ve had guests over the years, like Jocko willing to talk about extreme ownership. And he’ll make this comparison. He’ll come back from, like, Ramadi in Iraq and then look around and everyone’s complaining because they don’t have the oat milk or their explorers, you know, you know, power suspension doesn’t work. And they just see these like 2 dichotomy of worlds where 1, you know, you really have to put yourself to the test. And then the other one, it’s almost too luxurious. And yeah, people have said that the state has kind of replaced the, the, the nuclear family somehow. And you can say in some ways it has. And you mentioned COVID.

12:53 You know, COVID was a bit like that as well, where it was like, well, the state’s going to tell you what to do as opposed to, OK, you do what you want to do or you can make some decisions on your own. And I think that also programmed people in. And so, yeah, I think books like this are really important to try to put that back on to people and make them realise that it’s ultimately on you. I think Vivek Ramaswamy is real popular in saying he said that, that the single most important determining factor in your success is you. And I really like the way he’s said that recently. And it kind of stuck out in my mind. Just to finish up on the election, You know, I think they’ve said that now maybe 6 counties in the entire United States could determine this election. Do you find that kind of strange that, you know, democracy with three hundred 350 million people could ultimately come down to just a few small areas and these use ball swing states. And I’m wondering like what the founding fathers might say about that?

13:49 And is that sustainable in the future? Is that healthy? Is it not? I don’t know. Do you have thoughts on that?

13:55 Anthony Pompliano: When it comes to the actual election process and kind of how do we draw district lines, how do we think about the Electoral College versus the general population vote, You know, there’s a whole bunch to unpack there. I think the most important thing is asking ourselves, does the election reflect the will of the people? And there’s a lot of debate as to whether that answer is true or not. You know, what I’ve taken, you know, a little bit of interest in doing is looking around the world. Forget the United States for a second. I grew up in this system.

14:26 You know, I understand it just enough to be dangerous in a conversation, but I’m not an expert on it. But let me go look around the world. And what I find really interesting is that there are places. Take the recent Venezuelan election where it is highly contested. the United States is saying that one side won. The incumbent is saying that they won. And when you go and you look at what the US and critics are pointing to, as, you know, the things the incumbents did in order to help their chances all the way to potentially cheat. And then you extrapolate that back to the US, you say, listen, this is not a Republican or Democrat thing. This is both political parties constantly, you know, kind of competing with each other as to how to give themselves an advantage.

15:11 And so, you know, there’s obviously with the 2020 election, a tonne of conversation as to what was, you know, a fair and free election and, and were there any issues there, etcetera. Put all of that aside for a second. Let’s look at the things that people actually agree upon. And if you look at the things that people agree upon is that it used to be that you went to the ballot box on one day. Everyone in the country voted on one day. Obviously now in the United States, you can vote for weeks in advance.

15:39 And so there has been changed. Nobody is denying that. Nobody is saying that that’s not happening, but it begs the question, should it be happening? Is it actually helpful? Does it lead to a more fair and free election? Again, there’s no right answer.

15:54 People are going to debate these things back and forth. And So what I think ends up if you kind of bring it to the current election, if you have a country where 50% of the population does not know if the election was free or fair, then obviously that is a big problem. And I say that because I think that in this election in particular, regardless of who wins, the other side is going to complain that the election was not fair. And so that is a very weird position to be in, maybe in the nicest, you know, framing.

16:27 It’s a very dangerous position to be in on the kind of, you know, not so nice framing. And so if we look at this election, what I actually think is really important is that it is not close. The best thing that could happen for America is that it is a landslide in either direction. Now, if it is close, you’re going to get immense debate. You’re going to get the other side screaming and saying, hey, somebody cheated, etcetera. If it’s a landslide, it’s really hard to claim that. And so if you look at some of the polling, if you look at prediction markets, there’s a lot of volatility as well in this election, which I think is quite interesting. You know, historically what you’ve seen is one candidate has an advantage, the other candidate is kind of the challenger.

17:09 They’re trying to gain ground and it’s all about can they gain the ground before the Election Day in the last four to five weeks, right? And if even if he extrapolated out through July, take Donald Trump, for example, assassination attempt, his odds spike. Joe Biden gets replaced, his odds drop. He comes back because he’s got a great rally spikes again. And so you almost have this like kind of jockeying back and forth between who’s the leading candidate going into this election. One of the big questions for me is who do we trust? Do we trust the polls or do we trust the prediction markets? I saw just recently that Nate Silver has a pull out, which has Kamala Harris leading by a pretty healthy margin, you know, 5-6 points.

17:51 The prediction markets right now have Donald Trump leading by about 8%. And So what you have is kind of a real time skin in the game betting market versus kind of traditional pulling. And I put Nate Silver as one of the best at the, you know, figuring out how to actually pull and, and really figure out the answer. I don’t know which one is actually accurate. And so we’re going to find out. But I do think that in this election in particular, prediction markets are going to be seen kind of coming out of it as having been much more accurate than traditional polling.

18:22 And if that is true, which is a big if, but if it is true, I do think it will change the way that people look at odds for financial, economic, social, political, you know, kind of geopolitical different types of events moving forward. And so if we become a society that looks at prediction markets for signal before we look at kind of our traditional information sources, that would be a very interesting and very different world to live in moving forward.

18:47 Brian Rose: Yeah, I’ve been watching both of those things as well.

18:50 You know, Polymarket is kind of popular in the crypto circles because you can plug in your Polygon wallet and put significant amount amounts of money on these betting odds. And after Elon showed up at Trump’s RE rally in Butler, those markets like went from basically even like you said, to like 6-7, eight points. And again, I don’t know if I trust that. You know, I ran to be Mayor of London in three years ago. And at one point the betting odds had me as like #2 because I think a bunch of our fans were bet placing bets. That didn’t mean that I was really #2 and it didn’t help when the BBC were going to do debates, they didn’t invite me. So again, it’s hard to say if that’s the one or then you look at these polls in the New York Times and clearly they’re probably biassed.

19:34 Google probably is biassed. And so, yeah, I think we’re going to learn about which one was maybe more accurate. I still don’t know. I can’t believe that the market for Trump moved that much in 24 hours. And we’ve also heard of people in polling market trying to push things here and there for settlements.

19:51 And again, at the end of the day, I guess it’s just money moving markets. And we know sometimes markets don’t actually reflect things. So it’s.

19:59 Anthony Pompliano: What I also think is really interesting, Brian, is that, you know. Elon Musk is a really interesting person in the election because there are very few people who have the reach and the cult following that he has. You can think of, you know, Taylor Swift and and some others that are on both sides of the political aisle. But he also has the substance to back up in terms of he’s got a lot of money, so he can put that money to work. He can bring a very different audience to politics then maybe historically has paid attention.

20:29 And then what I think is probably the most interesting is he can dominate headlines. You know, one of my favourite questions when I meet reporters is always who would I not expect that if you put them in the headline, they drive a lot of traffic. And, you know, I’ve been surprised in the past people will say Jamie Dimon and it’s like, hey, he’s a big name. Obviously, you know, he’s very important, got a great job, but you wouldn’t expect that to be the answer. Donald Trump is the obvious one that everyone, you know, now knows.

20:53 Elon Musk is probably the only person that can really rival Donald Trump in terms of driving traffic. And so you put these two people who have the ability to drive traffic and dominate the conversation together campaigning, it makes sense why the prediction market moves, right? It just kind of it takes over in terms of the, the, you know, mind share of people thinking about the election, at least, you know, 50% or so of the nation.

21:18 Brian Rose: Yeah, it’s stranger than fiction to watch this thing. And like, you know, we’re both an independent media and you see the value sometimes of like a collab, like you’ll have a guest on your show and the the sum is greater than the parts and all of a sudden something happens.

21:33 So yeah, Elon showing up at that rally. Obviously Elon has his following 200 million followers. Of course, then he owns Twitter and there’s all these aspects in there and it’s a weird synergy those two have. And then, of course, you got the Dream Team and then Bobby Kennedy, who was on our show back in 2020 originally talking about COVID and then to see him join that team and then, you know, the the Cantor Fitzgerald BCG guy that’s doing the transition and Tulsi Gabbard. I mean, it’s just it’s wild to watch. And so, yeah, you’re right.

22:02 Besides Trump, I’d say Musk is probably next in line for someone who can really move the needle from perspective. And he’s got his own platform, which also makes a difference. It’s like it’s fascinating to watch. Speaking of Trump, you’ve been in Bitcoin for a long time. You know, you’ve been an early adopter.

22:18 You’ve been talking about it for a long time. How strange was it for you to see him show up at that Bitcoin conference in Nashville? Because I’m sure you remember the days where you might be denied a bank account for having crypto in your, you know, in your remit. And now to see a former president go there and say, never sell your Bitcoin. I’m going to fire Gary Gensler twice. What did you make of that?

22:42 And was it surreal to watch?

22:44 Anthony Pompliano: One of the most interesting aspects of Bitcoin is that it’s been a bottoms up adoption story. And so if you go and you study kind of historical technology adoption, it always starts with militaries or nation States and then it kind of trickles down to corporations and then eventually individuals. So if you look at the computer as an example, you’d have a lot of money, right, to be able to get a computer to get access to the Internet and it was used by militaries in nation states.

23:09 Then there was the mainframe computers that ended up in, you know, offices or in universities and people would literally trek across campus to be able to go use the computer. Then eventually, last was people got to put a computer on their desk in their home, in their pocket as a smartphone, etcetera. Bitcoin was not adopted by nation states, it was not adopted by corporations. It was adopted by individuals and frankly, it was adopted by the fringes of society. To start, computer programmers, cypherpunks, you know that whole crowd 1st.

23:37 And so as that asset and that technology has been adopted, you have trickled up into financial organisations, corporations. Now we’re starting to see nation States and, you know, obviously militaries, I think will also start to try to figure out how to use this as well. Now, as part of that adoption, there is a sequence that everyone goes through. When you first hear about Bitcoin, your initial reaction is that’s crazy. There’s no way that could work.

24:03 I don’t like that thing. That sounds like it’s something for criminals and, you know, bad nefarious actors. And then you usually hear about it a little bit later tends to be when the price starts going up and your friends are talking about it again. And then you say that thing’s still around. What is this thing?

24:18 Let me go and do a little bit of research. And then eventually you become a little bit more sympathetic to the story, but you haven’t bought any yet. Eventually you buy some. And then very quickly after you’re like a hardcore Bitcoiner and you’re telling everyone about, you know, running a node or going outside in the sun or only eating meat or, you know, whatever cultural thing that the Bitcoiners are into at any given time. I think that Donald Trump went through the same exact journey.

24:41 He just did it in front of cameras at press conferences because when he first heard about it, he said basically, that’s for bad people. I’m for the dollar. This Bitcoin thing is a threat to the dollar. I don’t like it makes sense for the president of the United States to say that he isn’t like a threat to the US dollar. If Bitcoin was actually threatening the dollar, he should say that. What I think now has happened is he’s had a lot of time go by. He’s kept hearing about it.

25:02 He realised it didn’t die. He’s had a lot of people spend time to educate him. And so if you go and you look at what he said at the Bitcoin conference, he said all the right talking points. But let’s say, hey, you know what? This is politics, a lot of campaign promises. Let’s just take 50% of what he says at face value. What I found most interesting is when he was talking about, let’s say Gary Ginsler and you can tell he was reading off the teleprompter and the crowd reaction. He got to step back and you can see his like showman mindset take over.

25:31 And he was like, oh, you guys like that? Let me say it again, right? And kind of leaned into it. But for people that have access to audiences, it’s almost the best AB testing ground for these ideas. And so politicians have a very unique role in society.

25:48 We judge them on what we think they believe, but we want them to govern based on what we believe. So it’s this very interesting dynamic of regardless of what Donald Trump believes about Bitcoin, do we actually want him to carry out the will of the people on Bitcoin? And so even if you don’t believe that he actually understands Bitcoin or believes in Bitcoin, etcetera, I think he’s at a point where he’s like, there’s a lot of people who own this thing. I think this is good for America because they think it’s good for America and I’m going to protect it. And so that’s actually what you want in a politician is you want them to exhibit the will of the people regardless of what they believe.

26:26 Now, the hard part is, are they going to do that or not? Part of the evaluation process is figuring out who are they? What are their values, what do they believe? What do they say they’re going to do? You know, you got to kind of evaluate all that.

26:37 Now flip around to the other side. Kamala Harris, whether she was explicitly involved or not, the current administration has been very hostile to Bitcoin in the crypto industry. And so she, although the track record is very negative and I think people, rightfully so, are saying, listen, we don’t believe that you are going to become supportive because of what’s gone on for the last 3 1/2 years. She has an advantage on Donald Trump today. She can take action in the next 30 days before the election and prove that she is sympathetic to Bitcoin and crypto. He can’t do that.

27:09 All he can do is promise things. He’s out of office. But the current administration, they don’t have to do a lot. One or two different actions could very quickly convince people, hey, you know what, actually, maybe she is going to treat this differently and she might not be able to switch people from being hardcore Trump supporters to become hardcore Kamala supporters. But if she could just maybe disincentivize their enthusiasm, bring them more towards the centre, be less negative towards her, that probably would be a win. And so in a weird way, people in the crypto industry think this Bitcoin topic is so important.

27:43 Everyone wants to talk about what does Trump think, What does Kamala think, Who is going to do what? But the truth is, if you go outside the industry, nobody cares. This is not an actual issue that’s going to decide who becomes president of the United States. We’ve now had two different presidential debates. It’s not come up a single time.

28:02 If you look at polling, nobody cares. And so in a weird way, this is like intellectual stimulation for a bunch of nerds on the Internet. But the reason why they’re not campaigning on this stuff, going and talking about it to kind of the general public outside of talking to directly crypto audiences, is because the general population doesn’t care. They’re asleep at the wheel. They have no clue what’s going on with inflation.

28:24 They have no clue about the erosion of purchasing power. They literally don’t think that censorship is a problem. We live again in that prosperous country where we be a luxury of ignoring all these threats that other people around the world live under every day. And so it’s actually a developing nation story. Those are the people who are running towards Bitcoin. Americans just look at it as maybe it’s a get rich quick thing.

28:46 Maybe I buy some, it goes up in price. And you know, I tell all my friends how smart I am, but do I really think the bank, if I go to the ATM, isn’t going to give me my money? No, Almost everybody in America believes the money’s going to come. And so again, Trump I think is hitting on an area where he thinks that there is passion, there’s enthusiasm, there’s fundraising capabilities, etcetera. But I think both candidates and their administrations know who is the next president of the United States is not going to be determined on how much do you support something like Bitcoin or crypto.

29:18 Brian Rose: It’s funny, I’m having flashbacks here because, you know, back in 21 I spent seven months running to be the next Mayor of London and it was so important to me and I thought the issues were so important.

29:29 I remember the day of the election, I was out campaigning in our big battle bust and I stopped this woman on the street and I gave her the whole pitch and she’s like, OK, I’m just going to vote right now, I’m going to vote for you. And I realised that for 364 days of that year, she did not care who the mayor was. And she was one of the few people, probably one in three, that was actually going to vote that day. And she just woke up and decided she would go vote. And she had ten other problems that were more important and didn’t care about my issues and really wasn’t thinking about it. And so, yeah, in that sense, I guess you’re probably right, is that most people, it’s just not something that’s in their pattern interrupt.

30:08 Anthony Pompliano: They’re worried about their kids and their bills and all the other things. It’s a huge problem in Western society, right? One of our greatest strengths is individualism. One of our greatest weaknesses is individualism. And so if you look at there, there’s this great study that’s been done as to how many people die alone in Western society, an enormous amount compared to the rest of the world, right? If you go to India or many other countries around the world, what you find is that somebody gets sold. They then are taken in by their family, usually their kids or their grandkids.

30:41 They’re taken care of and they die within the family. The death experience in America is you die in a hospital and hopefully you’re lucky if you got one or two family members there. So the individualism leads to the kids want to be out on their own. They don’t want their parents to move in with them. The individualism leads to the parent or the grandparent not wanting to have to be a burden to their kid.

31:04 And so this is very interesting dynamic around how much America specifically has been prosperous and productive and had all this economic growth because of the individualism, the belief in capitalism, the belief in entrepreneurship, but it also doesn’t degrade the human experience. And so if you go and you look at politics, the great politicians try to create collectivism. They try to bring people together. They want us all to sacrifice to some degree for the greater good.

31:30 How do we together govern? How do we together live? How do we create a better future for our children? American ideals are not that right? We get moments of it. After September 11th, patriotism is very high. People want to come together.

31:44 They want to sacrifice for their neighbour. Times of war, same thing. But to that woman that you met in London on the day of voting, she’s probably literally just thinking about how do I go out and create a better life for me and my family today? I don’t give a shit who is the politician. I don’t care who is, you know, doing, making any of these decisions.

32:04 And so that’s a challenge for politicians. Forget what your policies are. How do you convince people to care who the actual person getting elected is? And so I think that’s where you see in America right now, Donald Trump and Kamala Harris trying to figure out how do we just get people to go out to the voting? How do we get them to go to the ballot box? Because we know if we can get people to turn out and vote that it will change the election results. And I think Democrats historically have been very big proponents of getting out the vote because they know that they disproportionately benefit when that happens. But I’ll tell you this.

32:41 I just tweeted a a clip of the Teamsters president, the union president. Historically they have supported the Democratic candidate. They this year, I believe it’s the first time in history, have decided not to endorse either candidate, which came from, they polled their union members and over 60% of them supported Donald Trump and not Kamala Harris. And So what he was talking about was he was saying the Democratic Party is supposed to be the party of the working people. Democratic Party is supposed to be promising, you know, AB and C things for me, my union members, people like us. What have they done for us recently? And I took this clip and what was so fascinating to me, forget for a second Republican Democrat, what your politics are, all that stuff.

33:22 If you study history, political parties evolve. They believe different things at different points in history. They support different groups of people. They look at what do we actually have as our makeup of the political party, what are the issues of the day, Where do we stand, How do we want to govern who the candidates are? And they evolve. I believe right now, both in the United States and globally, we’re going through a moment of transition where what it means to be on the left or on the right is changing. Again, I said that both politicians are populist candidates.

33:55 You would never think that the Republican Party was taking a populist approach and potentially could garden more than 60% of the Teamsters support. But that is where the country is. And so both political parties are trying to figure out, OK, if the ground shifts underneath us, where do we stand, who do we support, what are our policies? And maybe a glimmer of hope moving forward is that both candidates are getting pulled more towards the centre. Kamala Harris was a very left-leaning senator, believed, you know, I think was the number one most left politician. Donald Trump had many views that people would put as, you know, kind of on the right in terms of a women’s reproductive rights, etcetera.

34:40 He softened those. He now says, I don’t support a national band. I want to push this down to the states. I support IVF. Kamala Harris supporting a southern border wall, right, Not rolling back the tariffs on China becoming much more centrist in some of our views. So if both candidates are getting pulled to the centre, maybe, maybe the shifting of the ground is actually that people are saying, you know, I just don’t like extremism in any form.

35:05 I actually want somebody who understands the plight of the people and is willing to just have common sense governance. The debate is what is common sense. And you know, you’re a better man than me for running for London mayor and trying to figure out, hey, how do I go and communicate with common sense is. But I think that’s really where, you know, kind of global politics is right now is that as that ground shifts, the people who win, the people who garner attention are going to be the people who say, this is what I believe, this is who I want to serve. These are my policies.

35:36 And they’re going to be able to get enough people to rally around that to ultimately get them elected.

35:41 Brian Rose: Yeah, it’s fascinating times, like you said, to watch. I mean, to know that the Teamsters might pull for a Republican, Never would we have thought that would happen 20-30 years ago. And yeah, politics is fascinating. It’s also crazy and it’ll drive you crazy if you run. Trust me.

35:56 There was a member of Parliament that pulled me aside and he said, Brian, politics is show business for ugly people is what he told me. And then he laughed and that was his advice to me. You told me about Trump’s crypto adoption curve. I was wondering if you could tell me what you think of Larry Fink, a Black rocks crypto adoption curve. I had Scaramucci in here six months ago and you know, he, he always tells his story of bumping into Larry and Davos a couple years ago and, and Larry came up to him and said you like this Bitcoin thing.

36:28 He’s like, I don’t like it. And I think, I think Mooch was like, you know what, you know, I suggest you spend another 1020 hours on it and do a deeper dive. Now the Mooch won’t take credit for this, but obviously Larry came full circle. Sailor likes to tweet out and joke that he’s the chief marketing officer of Bitcoin, but now they own over 2% of the supply. And I’m curious, what do you think of that?

36:49 And are you concerned that BlackRock, some say is just an arm of the government alongside of JP Morgan might end up owning too much of Bitcoin or controlling too much of it? So I guess that’s two questions and 1:00.

37:03 Anthony Pompliano: Yeah. So I’m aware of a very concerted effort among some large Bitcoin holders who they said, you know, Larry Fink is the key to getting a lot of changes to happen on Wall Street. And that concerted effort was to sit down with him, talk to him, educate him and see, could he understand where they were coming from.

37:24 Now, these people happen to be, you know, kind of traditionally very successful finance people who happen to like Bitcoin. They weren’t kind of your, you know, cypherpunk, kind of traditional Bitcoiner. And so they were very successful in that. Maybe we’ll call it an intervention of, hey, look, we, you know, we own a lot of this. We think that this is good. Here’s why we like it.

37:45 Here’s what we think the risks are. Here’s how we think the world’s going to play out in the future.

38:49 On top of what is an external, you know, kind of marketing campaign, maybe to Larry Fink, kind of an audience of one, there was also an internal effort. So there’s a gentleman, Robbie Mitchnick, who is the head of digital assets at BlackRock. There’s a couple other people internally. They really worked hard to do the work, right? When when you work inside the company, you can’t just like call up the big boss and say, hey, let’s go to lunch. I got an idea.

39:12 You got to kind of put together research. You got to put together an argument. You got to not only explain why is this asset going to be something that’s going to be valuable in the future, but you also got to explain why is this good for our clients? Why is this good for our shareholders? How should we think about the risk?

39:25 What is the compliance, right? All those things go into kind of forming that argument. And so I like to think that there’s an external and an internal kind of intervention. And Larry Fink ultimately say, you know what, I, I do agree, I think that this is going to be a big thing. Him going on television talking about people buying Bitcoin as a flight to quality is a very big deal.

39:44 You know, I’d like to think of there’s different seasons to Bitcoin and the season of Bitcoiners being important for Bitcoin in terms of the marketing of Bitcoin is over. It is now the torch been passed to the Larry Finks of the world. No matter how hard anyone in the Bitcoin community tries to market Bitcoin, they will always be less important now than Larry Finks simply just saying Bitcoin is good. And so understanding kind of who has that torch is important.

40:12 Now, what is important is the Bitcoiners that end up actually trying to defend the ethos of Bitcoin. And that leads into the conversation of can someone own too much of Bitcoin? Michael Saylor owns over 1%. The Winklevoss twins, they own at least 1%. BlackRock has 2%. You know, we very quickly can get to 1015% just on known people who own a lot of Bitcoin.

40:33 Satoshi over 800,000 Bitcoin, right? You just kind of go down the line. The beauty is that no matter how much Bitcoin you own, you do not control the network. You cannot manipulate it in the way that would be nefarious or malicious to anybody else. And so in a way that the US government was created, you know, there’s the kind of these three branches of the US government and their service cheques and balances on each other. The Bitcoin network has those same cheques and balances. It was devised in a very similar way. The software developers, you have the miners, and then you’ve got the node operators.

41:01 And so each one of those groups serves as a check or a balance on the other groups. And we saw during the block size wars where over 80% of all mining hash rate try to make changes. And it was the node operators who were able to stand up and defend Bitcoin. And so while most people would like to see decentralised ownership on top of a decentralised computational network, I think we can find solace in the fact that BlackRock could own 10% of Bitcoin and they can’t do anything different than you or I.

41:31 And so I do think that that is, you know, kind of the beauty of what Soshi Satoshi created. What I wonder is if there’s enough concentrated ownership, does the the liquid supply, what is available for trading become so little that we get more and more volatility over time? That is an unanswered question right now. We’ve seen volatility go down, but there is not too much imagination needed to find scenarios where actually volatility would go up. And it has to do with if BlackRock owns 5%, other people own, you know, multiple percent and they’re just holding that supply on top of the individual Bitcoiners holding that supply.

42:12 You know, we how many stocks have we seen float one or 2% of their total shares and they RIP hundreds of percent. If that was to happen with Bitcoin in an asset where you can’t issue more shares, you can’t temper, you know, kind of the enthusiasm, there’s a lot of kind of crazy stuff that could happen. And so these are all things to pay attention to. But the beauty is that no matter how much Bitcoin BlackRock and Larry Fink own, they don’t get to use the network any differently than you and I.

42:40 And I think that that is really what we mean by some sort of decentralised financial system is no matter how wealthy you are, you get in line in the blocks just like everybody else.

42:49 Brian Rose: Yeah, that is part of the beauty of that tech You mentioned Satoshi. There’s this new HBO documentary where apparently they’re going to reveal the identity. And of course, everyone’s been guessing for years and I don’t think anyone’s come up with a conclusion. But you know, Michael Saylor, I know you’ve talked to him.

43:04 We’ve talked to him a couple of times. I think he said part of the beauty and maybe even the success of Bitcoin is having that anonymous founder and having that supply that’s never moved. Do you think it’s important to never know that identity? Do you have thoughts yourself? Do you think it ultimately promotes the value of Bitcoin when that person is anonymous?

43:28 Anthony Pompliano: It’s less surface area to attack the asset. If you look at ether, the second largest cryptocurrency in network, how many people attack metallic Boudrin? How many of them question when he says something? How many of them act differently when he says something? How many of them don’t buy because they think he’s acting weird at a conference? How many people buy the asset because they think he’s really smart?

43:54 Those things all play into it. And then God forbid Satoshi came out and was on one side of the political aisle or had a certain nationality that maybe was positive relationships with the US or negative relationships. We don’t have to worry about any of that. It’s just all of those what ifs get thrown to the side ’cause we don’t know. And so, you know, I’ve said multiple times the world is better off without knowing who’s Toshi Nakamoto is.

44:19 The beauty of this asset is decentralised. And what’s fascinating, you know, my wife thinks that Satoshi is a woman, and I asked her why, and she said there’s no man who could create that and not tell anyone, which, you know, again, forget for a second whether you agree with her or not, the fact that someone didn’t create it and didn’t tell anyone, it never has come out. It’s one of the great mysteries of the world, but it’s also one of the great gifts to the world because it means that we don’t spend our time speculating on whether that person is good or bad.

44:53 We simply evaluate what is the merit of what they built. And so there’s a very strong argument that maybe more technology would benefit from having a pseudonymous founder. Now it’s hard to do, especially now that everyone’s looking for these types of technologies. It’s also very difficult to create technologies that are truly decentralised because you usually need to optimise for performance. And so there’s a trade off between security and performance. But I think that Satoshi really created the perfect solution to the hard problem of the double spend and did it at a time and in a way that allowed for what I’ve heard people refer to as the Immaculate Conception.

45:40 And so if you kind of think of like Bitcoin just came into the world and nobody is able to pinpoint so much of that early story, we don’t get to run the other experiment. You know, if Brian Rose was the creator of Bitcoin, what would have happened? We don’t know. But the nice thing is, if we were going to run one of the two experiments, running the pseudonymous 1 was the right one to run because it gave us the highest probability of success. And so to see Bitcoin where it is today, 15 years later, is pretty impressive. But it begs the question, if things in motion stay in motion, what is it going to look like 15 years from now, Right. And I think that question kind of leans into like, what if everything goes right?

46:26 Everyone was talking about what if things go wrong? What if things go right? And I think that’s why you see so many technologists interested in this is because they go and they look at the technicals and, and they try to understand how it’s created, etcetera. But ultimately people who create technology are optimists as a default. And so they believe that things can go right.

46:44 But in finance, people are default pessimists because they’re constantly trying to figure out who’s trying to screw me, who’s trying to win the 0 sum game. And so it’s the difference between creation and technology versus redistribution in finance. And now all the finance people are coming around because they’re realising it’s not going to die. And so the technologists still believe in this kind of utopian, future positive, you know, optimistic view of the world and kind of, you know, we can create all this stuff.

47:18 But going back to your other question about can they own too much, A lot of them just say 21 million, how many can I own? It’s very 0 sum. And so they’re trying to kind of get, you know, their portion. And so I just think it’s fascinating to see again, season 2 of Bitcoin now where there’s a whole new group of people. They think about it completely differently. They’re buying for different reasons. And I think that people who own Bitcoin have been around for a while understand that the holder base is changing, that people are changing.

47:46 And as long as you continue to believe in Bitcoin and hold, I think you’re going to be very happy, you know, decades from now, you know.

47:53 Brian Rose: One of the things I find interesting about you, Anthony, is that based on the way you talk, a lot of people would expect you to be a Bitcoin maxi. And if people don’t know the definition of that, and there’s probably a few, but it probably means that you think the world revolves around Bitcoin and the only thing that should exist on blockchain is Bitcoin. Just just just to, to, to tell everybody. I first of all, my Bitcoin, my first Bitcoin in 2013 when I had Max Keiser on my show here in London and we had a whole yelling match about Bitcoin.

48:23 He ended up become a good friend, him and Stacey and I was on his show, but he still refuses to come back on my show lately because I talk about other things besides Bitcoin. And I do love you Max if you’re watching. And so I’m curious why you aren’t a maxi. I know that you have been amassing a pretty big Solana position I think since last year when you went in as early as like 48 bucks. And I know you were a little bit disillusioned with Ethereum in the last year.

48:51 I wonder if you could just talk on the fact that you’re not a maxi and what you do think of other block chains and and some of the controversy of people that don’t believe maybe they should exist.

49:01 Anthony Pompliano: Yeah, it’s a great question. So first, maybe we should talk about like, what happened when a blockchain was created, right? You know, there’s a double spend problem and a blockchain got created. And the best way I know how to describe what a blockchain actually is, is if four people sit down and play Monopoly and you kind of put your money out in front of you.

49:19 If you ever play with a child and they put the money underneath the table, all of a sudden we’re like, hey, put the money back up here. I don’t even know if you’re doing anything wrong. Just make sure the money’s on top of the table. So blockchain kind of has this transparent Ledger to it. And as we play, if I just have a yellow legal pad next to me, every time that somebody pays somebody else, I just write it down, you know, 1041, Brian pays Anthony $100. Anthony pays Brian $200, ten, 42, and every 10 minutes I just RIP the paper off.

49:44 It’s got all the transactions and we just stack them on top of each other. At any point, we can go into that stack and see what transactions happen. That’s all blockchain is. And so you’re batching every 10 minutes all the transactions that occur and it’s making sure that no one’s double spending the money in the game. Now the reason why that is important is because money was the first use case Bitcoin and I think that it kicked off a monetary revolution. The ideas of a programmatic monetary policy, the idea that you could have sound money principles in digital form. The idea that you could have this kind of non sovereign store of wealth that anyone could access anywhere in the world as long as they had an Internet connection regardless of wealth, sex, education, location, etcetera. That type of thing is the winner of that monetary revolution. But simultaneous is people have figured out how to use that same piece of technology to kick off a technology revolution. Best example you can see that is stable coins. And So what I think ends up happening is people who believe in Bitcoin believe that Bitcoin is the winner in the monetary revolution.

50:46 I agree. In that case, I’m a Bitcoin maximalist. I think that Bitcoin wins the monetary revolution. But I think that there is a technology revolution. And you know, if you think about kind of a database, the database was able to revolutionise money.

50:59 The US dollar today exists in a database form. The dollar won the monetary revolution because of the use of the database and has become dominant in the United States simply because we had one currency that was the winner. Databases are used for a lot of other things in technology, and so that technology revolution is a whole different thing. It’s like trying to compare Amazon to gold, trying to compare Google to oil. The technology company is trying to do something completely different than money.

51:27 And so I think that if Bitcoin is the winner in the monetary revolution, there will be winners in the technology revolution. But just because they have a shared piece of technology as the underpinning foundation, it doesn’t mean that if you support Bitcoin, everything else is going to be worth 0. And So what I usually tell the Bitcoin Maximus that I talk with who at times I actually agree with a lot of what they say. The one thing that I disagree with is Bitcoin is going to win that monetary fight, but there are going to be other things that use this technology that are going to be valuable. It doesn’t mean that if you’re a Bitcoin Maximus, you got to buy the other things.

52:00 It just means that now you should probably be careful about claiming everything else is going to 0. And so in that world, I think that people can either choose to participate or not. That’s the beauty of free markets, right? You can believe in Bitcoin and participate, or you can believe in Bitcoin and not participate. But some of the most hardcore Bitcoin maximalists that I know, what they will say is, you know, I’m all focused on Bitcoin.

52:22 It’s a focus thing. Bitcoin is the thing that I want to accumulate, that I want to build around, that I want to have a company on, etcetera. All that other stuff. Maybe it works, maybe it doesn’t. I’m just not focused there. I think it’s a very rational perspective to take. If you go and you look at that other bucket, the things that make something work in technology and become attractive are very different than what makes money attractive. Money is attractive because it stores value or it is easily used as a medium of exchange.

52:48 It’s very cheap, it’s fast, it’s global, etcetera. In technology, it’s all about performance and so things like decentralisation become way less important. But if you want to have a non sovereign money, you better be decentralised because guess what? People are trying to hack Bitcoin every single day, all day long. Nation states, different groups, individuals, etcetera. But imagine if Amazon was decentralised, it would defeat the whole purpose of having a highly efficient hierarchical structure which allows you to press a button on your phone and have something delivered in an hour. You need efficiency, you need performance. And so if you go and you look, you mentioned Solana, the reason why we’ve built such a big position there is we just think it’s cheaper and faster.

53:27 And so we think that is going to be the winner in terms of this cycles, you know, kind of smart contract platform. I also think that the second best product market fit product in crypto is stablecoins. So Bitcoin is by far got the best product market fit stablecoins have the second and there’s going to be a smart contract winner and people are going to do all kinds of crazy stuff on top of that. Whether those things work or not doesn’t matter. They’re going to want block space on one of these block chains. And so if you just look at that universe as Bitcoin stablecoins and a smart contract platform, that’s not that crazy, right? That is kind of a, a, a limited universe. There’s a whole bunch of other stuff which in my mind, maybe it works, maybe it doesn’t.

54:08 It’s kind of experimental. I don’t want to spend time on it because I’m focused on the three things that I think are currently working that seem to be the best risk of war. And so my message to Bitcoiners is, you’re right. You got the Bitcoin thing right. Look at where we were 15 years ago. Look at it today.

54:26 Larry thinks on television saying you’re right, congratulations. Do not get your feet stuck in cement. Understand that the world is continuing to evolve. If you said Bitcoin is going to be the only thing that is going to be valuable, and you still deny that stable coins are valuable globally, then you are just denying reality. The data is overwhelming the stable coins. The beauty of using stable coins in that example is that stable coins are a non controversial thing because it is just taking a Fiat currency, putting it onto a blockchain. It’s cheaper, it’s faster, it’s able to be used in a transparent Ledger, and so people don’t feel like somebody created the stablecoins in or enriching themselves at the expense of retail.

55:09 There’s kind of a moral component to it that is not usually assigned to all the altcoins that ends up actually kind of breaking that framework. And so if you think that Bitcoin’s going to win and you accept that stablecoins are valuable, then the natural progression is there’s probably going to be other things. And you can critique the fact that you don’t like somebody created an altcoin that they kept 30% of the supply. That’s a fair critique. But you can critique that while still admitting, you know what, there’s a lot of developers building on top of that piece of technology. And so it’s kind of like, do you want to be right or do you want to make money?

55:42 And one of the things I love about the Bitcoiners is they actually want to be right, right. The, the whole making money thing is it’s nice. Well, a lot of them make decisions and and talk publicly because they want to be right. And so whether you agree with them or not, you got to respect it. There’s not a lot of people still willing to say, you know what, I don’t care if I make money or not, I want to be right. And that’s a takes a very special type of human. And so I think that, you know, the Bitcoiners provide this great service to the world.

56:10 They provide a lot of learning and and kind of intellectual combat, especially online. Things are going to win or lose based on whether they have merit, Whether they actually solve someone’s problem doesn’t matter what the Bitcoiners say. And frankly, what the Bitcoiners say or don’t say about these pieces of technology isn’t going to matter for the outcome of those technologies. And so when you view that, you just got to ask yourself, what do I want to focus my time and energy on? For me, I’ve created a very specific kind of box. That’s what I focus on.

56:40 For some Bitcoiners, they say, you know what, it’s just Bitcoin got to respect that too, right? And it’s all about what makes them happy. What do they think ends up being the best use of that time and energy. And so, you know, I don’t think that these views of the world are as at odds as maybe, you know, people want to kind of evaluate. But let’s see, you know stable coins could fail tomorrow, right?

57:01 All other things could fail tomorrow. We just don’t know. And so only with the benefit of hindsight will we really know who is right and who is wrong.

57:08 Brian Rose: Yeah, that’s a great breakdown. You know, I just got back from Singapore and I spent a couple days at the Token 2049 conference, you know, sold out 20,000 people.

57:16 Crazy. I was actually there last year during the crypto winter bear market and it sure wasn’t a bear market in Singapore. So amazing to see how Asia is maybe even driving a lot of this technology right now. But then I went to Salon, a break point, my first ever. And I’ll tell you, Anthony, it was a, it was a, a wild vibe being in there, Very, very different than any conference I’ve been to. It felt like we were all in a club. I never saw the creator of a Dex get a standing ovation, which they got what Jupiter got.

57:45 And you know, obviously a lot of games, a lot of meme coins, a really cool vibe. And also somebody pulled me aside and they said, hey, Brian, I know you’re big on freedom of speech. I know you’re really against censorship and you know you’ve suffered because that in the past. He said that’s what Solana is. He said, sure, everybody complaints there’s too many mean coins, but guess what, you can do anything you want on this blockchain and no one’s going to tell you not to.

58:08 Whereas they were saying on base that maybe it’s harder to do because it’s associated with an exchange. And it felt like a really cool punk vibe. And I’m curious what you saw in Solana and why you fell out of love with Ethereum?

58:22 Anthony Pompliano: I started my entire crypto journey mining ether, which is a really important data point, right? I started mining in 2016.

58:29 I think that Ether’s price was like $8 and we were mining something like 5 Ether a day, which at the time, after making a pretty big investment in machines and you’re making 40 bucks a day, 50 bucks a day, that’s not really the path to making your money back, let alone having profit. But in the beginning of 2017, ether went from $8 to $100 in the first five months or so of the year. And it caught my attention, right? One of the beauties of all financial assets, price draws attention. And so as my attention got drawn, I started to learn more. And I made a fatal mistake at that time. And then I sold everything at like 150 bucks and I thought I was a genius.

59:10 You know, the next George Soros or Stanley Druckenmiller, I’m up 15 + X. Look how smart I am. Ethereum then ran from $150.00 to $1400 by the end of the year and I watched basically crying every day as it did it and I had too much pride to buy back in. But by the time the prices crashed, I then had done a lot of work. I understood Bitcoin much more and I went in and I bought a lot of Bitcoin in the bear market of 2018.

59:34 Now, the reason why I tell that story is because when I first started in the crypto industry, it was not a story of freedom, freedom of speech, you know, decentralised money, nation state sovereignty, none of that stuff. A college kid named JP Baer came to me and said, hey, you should put some money in and buy these machines and it’s going to print money. And I said, I’ve never had somebody pitch me on a money printer before, but that sounds interesting. Explain more.

1:00:00 They explained how it all worked. And I say, you know what, I’ll take a flyer on this, let’s give it a try. And it worked. And so my entry into crypto was very similar to other people. I think I’m just willing to admit it.

1:00:14 There was a money making opportunity and so a lot of people show up for the money. They want to get rich. That’s why all financial assets for the most part receive inflows. But the beauty of Bitcoin was it taught me about the world. It taught me about all these other components. And so I stayed for the money, but not the profit. The idea of digital sound money.

1:00:36 So come for the money, stay for the money. It’s great way to view kind of how people’s journey into this is as I learned more about Bitcoin, I realised that Bitcoin is not the first iteration of digital currencies. There’s 40 plus years of R&D that went into this. There’s E gold and many other attempts at these digital currencies in the past that didn’t work. Bitcoin is just the first one that worked that got some sort of global adoption. And so for most people, it’s the first time they’ve heard of one. But if you go back and you look at the cypherpunk history, you see that Bitcoin’s actually like the 15th iteration that ended up working somehow.

1:01:11 Google was like the 25th search engine that just the one that ended up working. But if you go and you look at Etherium, it’s actually the first smart contract platform. And so the risk of being disrupted is way higher for Etherium than it was for Bitcoin. And so that got me thinking, OK, well, what are the benefits of Etherium? What are the risks?

1:01:32 What else is out there? Etcetera. The name of the game in monetary revolutions is that it ends in maximalism. If you live in the United States, you get paid in dollars, you save in dollars, you spend in dollars, you pay your taxes in dollars. You are a dollar maximalist. But the name of the game in technology revolutions is competition.

1:01:48 There is constant iteration. Stasis equals death. And so you have to keep improving. And so when Solana started to run in the last cycle, I’d been an investor in a fund that had bought Solana very early at under a dollar run all the way up to $250. There was a lot of money that was made by a lot of people during that. And then it crashed.

1:02:10 And when it came back down, I think it hit something like 8 or $9 and started to recover. And I said, wait a minute, it didn’t die. I thought that all the altcoins, they were worthless, they all died. This one didn’t die. Started doing work on it and I realised it was faster, it was cheaper, people were moving over, developers were building on it, People realised, hey, wait a second, this thing solves our problem.

1:02:31 It’s not the most decentralised, but that’s OK. And so around 4550 bucks, I bought some, kept going up. And one of the beauties is when you buy an asset and it goes up, it’s confirming you’re right, you should buy more. Don’t take your foot off the gas. Bought more, bought more, bought more and I continued to do that.

1:02:47 And so we’ve built a fairly large position, second largest position in our crypto portfolio. But I look today and what I say to myself is if smart contracts are going to be successful, I think that Solana is going to be one of the winners. Not going to be the only one, but it’s going to be one of the winners. And if that occurs, there will be value that accrues to a token and therefore I’m going to hold it. I don’t know what it’s going to be worth in the future, but it feels like it’s going to be worth a lot more.

1:03:13 Now. What I do say also is Bitcoin I plan to give to my grandchildren. It’s an asset that you buy and hold forever. I don’t think that I will hand my Solana to my grandchildren because it is part of the technology revolution. And therefore there’s constant disruption in competition.

1:03:29 And therefore something is likely to come along at some point that is going to disrupt whatever the dominance of our contract platform is. And so know what you own, know what are the things you’re going to hold forever and know what are the things that you know, I’m going to hold it for whatever period of time, a year, 2 years, whatever it is. And then I’ll re evaluate. And I fully expect at some point to be convinced that I should actually put that money into something else. It is the balance between savings and investing. And then one of the frameworks I like to tell people is in the traditional financial system, you have a checking account, you got a savings account In crypto, you got a checking account, a savings account.

1:04:04 Bitcoin is a savings account, whether it is stable coins or altcoins or whatever, that’s kind of your checking account. You spend, you use, you, you, you play with the checking account, you don’t touch your savings account, right? And so in the financial system, we literally have that concept. Crypto has the same thing. You just got to kind of put those two mental models on top of each other and you realise Bitcoin is a savings account. Everything else is in your checking account. Some people are really good at spending, some people not so good.

1:04:32 Just don’t go on to debt. You should be OK over the long run.

1:04:35 Brian Rose: It’s a great analogy. What what else is in the portfolio and is there anything else that you’re looking at? I know you like to keep it simple and I guess I’ll throw one in there.

1:04:44 Have you done any work on the town ecosystem? Just because the narrative obviously is they got 900 million users using the app and then now they have, you know, a blockchain associated with it. It’s still very new and we don’t know everything about those users and how many are bots and not. But it seems to be doing the opposite of most layer ones, which is let’s build it and get the users. This has the users and then maybe we can build something on it.

1:05:10 So just curious what else is on your mind and or do you just try to keep things super simple?

1:05:15 Anthony Pompliano: Yeah, it, it’s a great question. In the portfolio today, there’s Bitcoin, there’s Solana, there’s one meme coin. We can talk a lot about meme coins, kind of our whole thesis on that. A friend of mine started it. I basically bought some because I wanted to kind of support him. It went up a lot.

1:05:31 It grew into this, you know, much bigger position than we’d ever anticipated. I’m not going to say which one it is because, you know, I, I don’t want people to go and, and buy it. But if you think about that, if I’m going to commentate on meme coins or anything else, and I probably should understand how they work, I should probably understand, you know what, what are the pros? What are the cons? I’m in a chat, I see how people are interacting. How are they thinking about it?

1:05:52 What’s the psychology? Are they buying this to get rich? Are they buying it as a nephew to the system or are they buying it as entertainment? All of those things are, are in there. But if you notice, it’s a very concentrated portfolio when it comes to crypto. And so I think about I’m allowed two positions, 2 real positions at any given time.

1:06:11 Tan is very interesting because of many of the things that you mentioned. Also, if you just listen to Pavel talk and you understand his history, his view of the world, he is the type of founder that we would love to back. But I’m only allowed two positions. And so I got the two positions I got maybe at some point in the future that changes. But by keeping it very concentrated, I am explicitly saying I want to understand as much as I can about the things that are in the portfolio today.

1:06:38 One of the things about Telegram that I think is really interesting is it maps perfectly to how we build businesses. We build all of our businesses that we incubate. Go get the audience first and then build the product. If you have a distribution advantage in today’s day and age in the digital world, it is incredibly difficult for people to be able to compete with you because the only option they have is they have to rent someone else’s audience if they don’t have their own. And so by going and owning that audience, you have better unit economics, you obviously get better information and feedback and then on top of that, you have a built in user base. And so that is what they have done, right? How much marketing do all of these other applications have to do, all these other kind of crypto projects have to do, Whereas Telegram can simply roll it out to this huge user base. And even if 80% of all of those users are bots and fake, they still have probably more users than almost any other crypto product out there.

1:07:37 And so they have a huge advantage. Now, one of the questions that I haven’t spent enough time to to really have an opinion on is where does the value accrue? Is it something where the value accrues to the equity or is it something where the value accrues to the token? If it does accrue to the token, Very interesting. But that’s the type of stuff that I think, you know, there’s a lot of people in crypto specifically, but now you’ve been kind of self-directed investors in public markets.

1:08:01 They’re looking at things and they kind of take a, an amateurish analysis. How high do I think it can go? But if you go and you talk to the best investors, they will always ask how low can it go? What are the risks? Where are the ways that I could put money into this thing and not get paid? How could I get screwed here?

1:08:18 And so understanding how to do both analysis, what if everything goes right and what if everything goes wrong is really important. And so I think that people in crypto are learning that because a lot of them frankly don’t have kind of traditional experience and or training when it comes to investment analysis. But as they pick that skill up, you’re going to get more and more sophisticated people, which will then make the projects or the token issuers become more sophisticated as well, right? If you’re just issuing a token and everyone’s uneducated in the market, you can get away with a lot of stuff that you might not be able to get away with, let’s say the public markets. But if it’s a really sophisticated audience and they’re starting to understand how this stuff works, now they’re going to hold you accountable. They’re not going to buy whatever it is that you have unless it fits some sort of framework. And so you see this perfectly in public markets. Adam Newman and Wework tried to go public, Public markets rejected it.

1:09:11 And so that only happens because you had sophisticated people who could read the documents who understood what was going on. We had a framework for how value accrues. And I think that stuff is coming to crypto, just takes a long time. You know, if you think of Ethereum, I think Ethereum launched in like 2015, if I remember correctly, or less than a decade in. Then you go and you look at a lot of these other projects, it’s super, super early. What happens?

1:09:33 I have no clue. But what I do know is that there’s a lot of people working on it. There’s a lot of money flowing over there. Let’s see.

1:09:40 Brian Rose: You opened a little bit of a can of worms with the meme coins. I got to ask you one follow up on that, Anthony. I never thought we’d be talking about that today. You know, meme coins are interesting. Funny enough, today, one of the meme coins we invested in on the Tun network just dropped a few hours ago. And it’s been a crazy ride today. You know, I was in Dubai in April at Token and a few people came up to me and said, oh, have you thought about doing a meme here and there?

1:10:05 And I was like, no, I never have. But it would be foolish of me to not want to learn more about this. And if you look at Sheba and Doge, I mean, they never moved in their ranking of the top, you know, 12 market caps through the whole cycle. And so it’s clearly not a fad. Clearly people want to be a part of something. It’s an expression somehow of culture. Like you said, fun or F you to the system. And so we’ve dabbled in three so far. You know, 1 was a mess, one was OK, and then the one today is looking pretty good.

1:10:34 It’s kind of interesting. And I’m trying to learn about why people do it. But you mentioned the audience size. This one we’re in today has over 50 million people in their Telegram channel. And I was telling my group last night, you know, we rarely see a 10th of that. We actually rarely see 100th of that in any other, you know, crypto protocol.

1:10:54 If you got a 500,000 member community, that’s strong, let alone 50 million. And we’ve made about 65 investments into different blockchain companies, about $15 million. So we’ve seen quite a few. But those numbers get your eyes open. And they might not be a North American higher owner audience, but they’re still, you know, humans or a chunk of them are, and they’re going to do something interesting.

1:11:16 And so just if I could get your hot take on what you’ve learned about memes so far and what you think people don’t understand about them, especially when you go on CNBC, you’re always educating them about Bitcoin. I mean when you go to educate them about memes, that seems like that will be another longer conversation.

1:12:07 Anthony Pompliano: But I’ll give you the exclusive view of of this Meme coins are not new and and let me talk about the traditional financial system to explain what’s going on in the new world. Berkshire Hathaway is the meme coin for boomers because what they look at is they look at the greatest financial influencer in the world is Warren Buffett.

1:12:59 He used the press, he used his annual letters, he held a conference. He basically taught a course for free, which was lead generation for his companies. This guy is a financial influencer. That is how he has been able to drive the reputation that he has. If you go and you look at Warren Buffett, he’s not a good person. He is not a moral person.

1:13:23 He essentially had two wives. He stuffed sugar and bad products down the heart of Americans, and he is probably responsible for a lot of problems. If you were a moral person, you would say, you know what? I’m not going to try to get America hooked on sugar. I’m not going to go peddle sugary drinks and try to make that more popular. I’m not going to have my personal life in such disarray. But instead we look at it and we say, you know, he actually is this great grandpa.

1:13:56 He’s very humble. And so one of the great paradoxes of Warren Buffett is, Can you believe and understand and respect his investment analysis while disagreeing with his personal life? That is the challenge for people. But you have to put him in the box. He’s a great financial influencer. Doesn’t mean he can’t be a good investor. Just understand that he was the original finance influencer. And then that brings you to Berkshire Hathaway. People go to Mecca, the capitalist Mecca is Omaha, NE, and they travel from all around the world to go and sit and listen to this man talk as if he’s the reincarnation of a capitalist Jesus.

1:14:32 It’s a meme coin. And So what ends up happening is people by Berkshire Hathaway because their financial advisor told them, look at the meme. Look at what this company does. What is the intrinsic value of Berkshire Hathaway? Nobody knows. Why does nobody know?

1:14:48 Because intrinsic value is a fake metric. There is no intrinsic value. It’s not a real thing. Because if I ask you what the intrinsic value is, you’ll give me an answer. If I go and ask Stanley Druckenmiller, he’ll give me a different answer.

1:14:59 And if I go and ask Warren Buffett, he’ll give me a different answer. If it’s intrinsic, there can’t be different answers. And so ultimately, there is no such thing as intrinsic value. What we do know is that Warren Buffett has been able to compound capital for a long time. He is a good investor, but Warren Buffett also has heavily relied on the fact that his father was a congressman, that he has direct connections to people in politics and so therefore again, using his influence to get deals that other investors would not be able to get. Good businessman.

1:15:31 And so the reason why I say Berkshire Hathaway is the meme coin for boomers is because the same way that the boomers are attracted to it like a mosquito delight, guess what? The 22 year olds are attracted to the latest shiny meme coin in the crypto world and the reason why the boomers want Berkshire Hathaway is because the meme is safety, the meme is cash flow. The meme is I hope it doesn’t go down a lot, but the meme for the 22 year old is the fast shiny thing that goes up a lot.

1:15:59 Because the difference between the boomers and the Gen Z ers is that the boomers benefited from the current system that we have. They majority have paid off their homes. 42% of Americans have no mortgage on their home. Most of those are just people who have owned their home for 30 years and paid it off. The Boomers are the ones who are benefiting because they know that Social Security will be there from them before it runs out in 2034. The Boomers are the ones who have the investment portfolios. They’ve had enough time to accumulate wealth and put it into the market.

1:16:29 So when inflation comes, when the national debt occurs, when the devaluation of the currency happens, it all flows to the investments and those portfolios continue to gain. The Boomers are the beneficiaries of the system, but the Gen Z ers have lost hope. They know there’s no way for them to catch up. If the median home in America is $280,000 in 2020 and it’s now over $400,000 in 2024, how the heck are they supposed to have their wages keep up if home affordability gap continues to expand?

1:17:02 They can’t make enough money. And so if you lose hope, you begin to speculate. And so that’s what they’re doing. Their mean is the only path to speculation. Whether you agree with it or not, the facts are very damning because that entire generation of people see no path to financial security.

1:17:20 It used to be in this country that you could save your way to financial security. You cannot do that today. That was good advice for the boomers. That is not good advice for Gen Z. If you save 100% of your wealth in cash, you are going to get screwed. You’re going to lose purchasing power. You’re going to become not wealthy and therefore you’re going to be on the wrong end of that wealth inequality gap that continues to widen.

1:17:39 And so that is why their meme is something different. But the meme coin that could go up 10X in an hour is very different than the Berkshire Hathaway, which is I don’t want to lose the advantage that I have in the world. And so they’re literally the same thing. People don’t like that in the traditional world when they hear that. But Berkshire Hathaway is the boomer meme coin. Warren Buffett is the financial influencer, and the 22 year old Jen Zier is doing the exact same thing. It’s just that their asset is different. And what I would argue to anyone in the traditional financial system is if you’re so smart, why didn’t you outperform Bitcoin?

1:18:14 Why didn’t you outperform Ethereum? Why didn’t you outperform Solana? Why didn’t you outperform those meme coins? Because what ends up happening is ultimately people want volatility. And the big lie of financial markets is there is no such thing as efficient market hypothesis. It’s not real, doesn’t work.

1:18:33 And on top of that, most people don’t actually care what they own. What they want is they want price exposure, not asset ownership. And So what we’re starting to see is people are creating coins that mirror equities, but it doesn’t give you a claim on the cash flow, it doesn’t give you a claim on the assets, it doesn’t give you any sort of ownership over anything. They simply want to express their view on price. And so of course the traditional world will say when things go down, that is going to be destructive.

1:19:03 If I own Tesla stock instead of Tesla coin, I have a claim on something. They’re not buying it for the downside. They’re buying it for the upside. So I remember when Reddit went public, there was Reddit at the equity and there was a Reddit cryptocurrency. The Reddit cryptocurrency went up more than the Reddit equity. If that keeps happening, guess what people are going to buy? They’re going to buy the coins that mirror the stocks rather than buy the stocks themselves.

1:19:27 And So what you’re getting is a divergent. I’m not saying that the 22 year old is right. I’m not saying that they’re going to be good over the long run. What I am saying though, is that they are following the exact same psychological framework that the boomers are following. It’s just that they’re expressing it in a different way because they’re in a different situation. And so if we have over $1.5 trillion of student debt, if we have people who can’t afford a home, if we’ve got people that are actually seeing their wages go down and purchasing power terms, what do you want them to do? Because if they follow what the boomers did, they’re going to end up in a worst financial position. And so I think that’s the whole thing with meme coins is that it’s easy for the sophisticated traditional investor to kind of look down their nose and say, look at these dumb kids. But actually the kids are being rational given the situation that they’re in, which is a sad state of America and of the world.

1:20:19 But the memes, they’ve dominated society forever. And so Berkshire Hathaway is a meme, whatever. The latest, greatest meme coin is a meme, and memes are the message. Capital flows to the best story. You see it in Tesla in the traditional markets.

1:20:35 You’re not seeing it with the meme coins. I don’t think it’s going to stop, actually. I think it’s going to accelerate again, whether that’s good or bad, somebody else can decide that. I just try to understand what’s happening. And I think that’s why meme coins are seeing so much capital flow to them. I always remind the Bitcoiners that that was basically a mean coin for a bunch of years, a bunch of kind of, you know, computer dorks with their Internet money and there was nothing going on.

1:20:58 There was no value or whatever. And it really was, whether they want to admit it or not.

1:21:03 Brian Rose: Now, I remember reading your tweets when you talked about kind of why people are gambling because they have nothing else. I mean, just to to close out on this, I mean, that’s, that seems like it doesn’t end well. And what is your ultimate message then to the Gen Z’s or Gen alphas? Like I know you talk a lot about saving is the wrong thing to do and investing is what you want to do. Is that the message to them or is there a message right now? When you can’t buy a home in America and the government’s printing money at just such a massive pace and the national debt service is bigger than the defence budget, is there a way out?

1:21:40 Anthony Pompliano: I think it goes back to, you know, kind of that main message in the book, which is you have agency. And so, you know, one of the things that I put in the book that I thought was kind of an inside joke or hilarious is I put 2 letters back-to-back that contradict each other. One is all my rich friends sold to her really. And the other is buy great assets that hold them forever, right? But you have the agency, the agency to decide which is which. You have to understand, for me, Bitcoin is the thing that I’m going to hold forever.

1:22:06 There are other things that I’m going to sell well beyond before they get to the top of the market, and that’s OK. But I have the agency to make that decision. Then there’s stories and lessons like spend less than you make. Why is that important? Well, so many people and there’s such this culture of don’t spend the $5 on coffee, but actually it’s easier for people probably to go make an extra $500 per week than it is to cut out $500.00 from their monthly expenses or their weekly expenses.

1:22:35 And so for young people, it is if you want a certain life, you have the agency to go create that life, but you have to take risks. And taking risks early is much better than trying to take risks later because the secret of life is that you will not take the risk later if you don’t take it early. And so don’t get comfortable. Do what you want to do now when you have much less to risk. And so one of the things that I always tell these young people is I say, listen, I’m not that much older than you.

1:23:03 I’m 36 years old. So like, I’m 50, but the world has changed so much in the 15 years since I graduated college. Instead, what if I could go back and do it again? What I do, I would take immense amounts of risk. I would do everything I possibly could to live for five or ten years the way no one wants to so that I could live the way that most people can’t live for the rest of my life.

1:23:25 It’s all about that sacrifice and risk taking. And so in society, we have now become a Society of safety. The word risk is toxic. It’s radioactive. No one wants to take risk, but that is where the return is.

1:23:39 You get paid the return for the risk you take. That’s true in financial markets. It’s true in life. If you look at your life and you’re 30 years old and say I’ve taken no risk, I went to a great school. I then went and I got a graduate degree. I then joined this corporation.

1:23:53 I’ve worked here for eight years. Look at how amazing and safe my life is. You probably don’t have financial freedom because you didn’t take the risk, you didn’t put the work in. And so I think that really is the message is to these young people is listen, bet on yourself. Figure out how to put yourself in a position where you can get upside in what you do, where there’s equity at a company you work in, build a company, figure out how to do investing side jobs, whatever. Figure out a way to put yourself in a situation where you do not have limited upside in terms of your compensation. On top of that work.

1:24:23 One of the most controversial things that I tweet from time to time, which always cracks me up, is I say some version of the people who I know who are successful have done it by working hard. And I get a tonne of people who come up with all of the edge cases and reasons why and all this stuff. None of the people I know that are successful are responding negatively to that tweet. Instead, they’re Dming me privately saying I agree, but they just don’t want the nonsense of replying publicly.

1:24:48 And so if we live in a society where the concept of hard work has become controversial, it tells you exactly where the psychological state of so many people are. And so if you are a young person and you work hard, you do what you say you’re going to do, and you take risk, you got a way higher probability of reaching financial security and also finding happiness. You know, one of the things that’s under discussed and I talked about in the book is that humans are happiest when they are creating things, creating a family, creating relationships, creating a portfolio, creating a company, creating a product, right?

1:25:19 Creating experiences like humans were built to create. And so if you take risks, if you create things, if you are able to stomach volatility, you are on the right path. The hard part is it’s difficult. And so if it’s difficult, most people don’t want to do it. And so, you know, whether you’re talking about working out, financial discipline or simply what are you going to do for work?

1:25:44 Real easy not to go to the gym, real easy not to take that risk on a financial asset, real easy to take the salary over the upside. But as we know, history just repeats over and over and over again. And so I think that young people who figure that out earlier rather than later just been a better spot.

1:26:01 Brian Rose: Yeah, one of my famous mentors on the show calls himself the Trillion Dollar Man. He’s got a castle in Scotland.

1:26:07 And he used to make fun of me because I’m an I’m an engineer from MIT. And, you know, engineers, you know, we’re trained to make sure the bridges, the bridges don’t fall down and the planes don’t come out of the air. And what it did is it made me risk averse over time because as an engineer, you’re trying to, you’re always worried about all the problems. And one of the things he taught me, you know, 10 years ago when he came on the show was I have to engineer risk into my life every single year if I want the rewards. And so now that’s what I think about. So when I ran for mayor, I mean, honestly, I just thought it was the craziest thing I could do.

1:26:41 And as as long as I engineer those risks in my life, I always have much more success. Now I have failures and I have things like that. But unless I’m engineering risk in nowadays, I don’t even feel alive. I don’t even feel like I’m showing up. And now I know that my default is to avoid it.

1:26:59 And now my default is now becoming to embrace it. And now I try to think of what’s the craziest thing I can do. We used to have a rule around here is that a year from now, we don’t want to, we can’t even imagine what London Real will look like, you know, And that’s because we’re doing something so out-of-the-box that we couldn’t even predict we would be there. And if we look to our history from like Megan document movies or, you know, running for mayor, it’s like what?

1:27:22 Never would have thought that would happen. So we’re trying to always do that. I want to jump into this book. It’s called How to Live an Extraordinary Life. It’s 65 letters written to your children that are now one in three.

1:27:33 We expected a Bitcoin book from Pomp or a book on the blockchain. But you wrote this book. Why? And did fatherhood change you in a significant way three years ago that maybe planted those seeds to to write something epic like that? Obviously, it’s not just for your kids.

1:27:50 I guess it’s for the world’s children. But but tell me, how did this happen?

1:27:54 Anthony Pompliano: Yeah, so as I’ve gone through life, I’ve always kind of kept notes of things that I’ve learned. I have an Apple note since I’ve had an iPhone. And I just keep putting, you know, various life lessons that go in there. And sometimes they’re, you know, kind of trite and simple. And other times they’re, you know, fairly profound and things that, you know, I can recall without even looking at the note.

1:28:14 But I’ve always had this sense. And I opened the book with the story that when people would ask me when I was younger, you know, what do you want to do in life? What what what’s your plan? I would always make some comment about, well, I got to do it before the age of 35, and I have no clue why 35, but I just used to think there’s no way I can live the life that I’m living and live past 35. And, you know, I tell a story in the book of, look, I was in the military.

1:28:37 I deployed to Iraq. I probably drove my motorcycle over 100 miles an hour on the highway more times than I want to admit. I, you know, had a way too many experiences of being out drinking with your friends and doing dumb things and kind of all the stuff that you would kind of label the quintessential American kid who had a lot of fun. That’s what I did. And I don’t regret a single second of it.

1:28:59 It was awesome. If I could live my entire life over, I would probably go do more of that stuff because it was cool and I had a lot of fun. I had a lot of fun with my friends, but I didn’t think you could live a fast life past 35. And so I always had that date in my head. And when I had my first child, I was 33 years old and my wife challenged me to write a letter to our first kid.

1:29:24 And frankly the 1st letter that I wrote was very much like, I’m so excited you’re making me a dad, you’re the best, I love you, Let’s be best friends. You know, 0 advice all about like this is cool. And when her first birthday came up, my wife challenged me to write another letter for her. And so that’s how I started thinking, what do I want this kid to know? You know, can, can I come up with this 35 thing? What if I don’t actually make it past my 35th birthday? How crazy would that be that I actually predicted, you know, that I wasn’t going to make it past 35 or whatever. And so I started looking at those notes and as I started to write the 1st letter, I realised I want to pass some sort of knowledge on.

1:30:02 So one letter turned into two to 4-5, whatever. And so somewhere between 5:00 and 10:00 letters, I decided, well, what if this actually was something that was not just applicable to my daughter, could actually be applicable to my son? And then let’s take a step further kind of your thing about like, let’s take a risk. Let’s let’s, you know, go even bigger. What did I just turn into a book?

1:30:20 And it helped that my wife is a former reporter. She is somebody who she had written a book. So maybe there’s a little bit of kind of a intermarriage competition. You know, I say my goal for the book is to sell one more copy than her now that I know what how many she sold. But but it was very much like, Hey, look, let’s take these letters, let’s go and, and, you know, let’s see what we can do here.

1:30:39 And so I started to write these letters and two things happened that shocked me. The first was I realised I was writing the letters for me, not them, because it was forcing me to have the mental clarity to explain to them, what did I actually learn? How did I learn this? How would I apply it in my life? It was making me better.

1:30:54 And then the second thing was I realised it wasn’t just advice for my kids that I could hand that same book to people I work with. I could hand that same book to people I met in life. It was things that, you know, kind of our timeless wisdom that frankly, none of the ideas are mine, right? That’s the beauty of a book like this is you have to live life in order to learn all these lessons. And you just have to be the one who kind of collects them, is able to articulate them in a certain way and then put that into a book and put it out into the world. And so in writing these letters, I then asked myself, towards the end, I said, how do I create a book that is built for the modern society?

1:31:28 I wanted to be timeless in terms of the content, but it’s got to be something that is modern in that somebody’s got to be able to listen to the audio book in three hours or less. Somebody’s got to be able to open any page and start reading from there and not have to read the book cover to cover. It’s got to be a book that is built to survive in terms of the content, not what is the quote on the cover. And so those things fed into this book and created it and put out in the world. So far so good.

1:31:56 People seem to like it, but what I found the most enjoyment out of is the people who write to me and say, Hey, I’m writing a letter to my kid now. Hey, let me show you this thing that I learned for the next one. You should put this lesson in there. And so that kind of feedback is really what I think is so beautiful about the Internet and kind of these digital communities is that there’s a two way conversation. And that’s really the thing now that every time I get one of those messages, I show my wife and I’m like, man, you know, I’m so glad I, I took the time to write this book because I’m learning even more after the book than I did as I was putting it together.

1:32:30 Brian Rose: Yeah, you got me thinking about writing letters to my boys now. So yeah, that definitely works. Some of the things that stood out to me were fire. Boring friends. I’d love to go deeper on that. Compete.

1:32:40 Don’t complain. You can’t live an extraordinary life sitting on your couch, live your life as a documentary, and we’re all going to die. Any of those You want to go a little deeper on the boring friends? I kind of want to hear more. About

1:32:53 Anthony Pompliano: Yeah, a lot of people just are friends with people because they feel like they got to be friends with them. But if you want to live an extraordinary life, you can’t do it with boring friends, right?

1:33:04 You can be friends with a boring person, but the odds if you hang out every Friday, Saturday and Sunday with boring people, you’re probably going to live a boring life. But if you have friends that one Saturday want to go skydiving, the next Saturday they want to go do this. The next Sunday, they want to do this, you’re probably going to live a pretty extraordinary life because your friends are going to force you to do things you might not otherwise do. And so it isn’t something where look around your whole friends circle and if they’re not doing epic stuff every weekend, you got to get rid of them. But it kind of goes back to the idea of if you go every single Friday, you sit in a bar, you talk to the same friends about the same shit and you’re all saying, how cool was it back when we were in high school playing football and you scored this touchdown.

1:33:43 You’re probably going to get the life that you are, you know, creating in terms of the input. And so this idea of firing boring friends doesn’t mean you got to call up your friends and you know, kind of Trump Apprentice style, say you’re fired instead. Don’t call them this weekend. What if they don’t call you? And then the next weekend, if you don’t call them and they don’t call you, maybe you weren’t as good a friends as you thought and you kind of grow apart over time. Now that works for some friends, some friends. You got to be intentional.

1:34:15 You know, if you live in a certain place and you have a certain group of friends, but you have aspirations to do something else or a life that you want to live that is something else, then you need to be intentional about making new friends. And so it get out of your comfort zone, right Fire boring friends is a really easy way to think and remember that lesson, but it really is more about are you being intentional about the people you hang out with? Are you surrounding yourself with people who are they themselves living their version of an extraordinary life?

1:34:42 And are you willing to do the uncomfortable work to seek out people or avoid people who don’t fit into your specific, the extraordinary life that you’re trying to live? That’s very hard for people to do. Again, it goes back to comfort. First risk. There is risk in not being friends with people you’re friends with today. There’s agency, though, in finding people who live an extraordinary life and saying, I want to be like you. I want to go and, and do things that you’re doing. Those concepts just continue to show up in life, regardless of whether you apply to your personal professional life. And so we all got boring friends. You don’t got to fire them all.

1:35:20 So maybe start with one or two and replace them with extraordinary friends and see how your life goes. And you may just get addicted to Let’s go find more of the extraordinary people.

1:35:29 Brian Rose: Such good advice. I’m I’m having a flashback to that Jim Rohn quote. You’re the average of the five people you spend the most time with. And I’ve managed to get some mentors over the year doing this programme.

1:35:39 And one of my famous ones is this Trillion Dollar Man. And there’s an episode where we’re here in the studio and he’s screaming at the top of his lungs at me and he’s saying he’s pointed the cameras in here, Anthony. He said these people think you’re a big deal. He’s pointing at all the London Realtors. He’s like, I know you’re not. He said I see you 1000 times more. And he’s so angry.

1:35:58 He’s spitting at me. And I always show that to like people in my academies. And I’m like, you know, do you want someone like that who is angry at you because you are not so much more, or do you want to hang out with the friends that want you to have another drink or watch Netflix for six more hours? And they all say, yeah, I want the mentor. And I’m like, yeah, you want the mentor. But also it’s super uncomfortable being around people like that too, because that’s how you’re going to get to the next level.

1:36:26 And they’re going to be pushing you and challenging you all the time. And, and that’s something that that I felt a lot. So that really resonated with me. Another one you said in here is it exercises, mental training masquerading as physical training. That’s pretty deep, pretty heavy. What did you mean?

1:36:44 Anthony Pompliano: Most people work out and when they’re working out, they think they’re doing it for the physical reasons. But I was talking to a friend a couple years ago and he said to me, do you meditate? And I said, no, I don’t meditate. And he said, that’s weird. Like how, how do you, you know, you had a lot of stuff going on?

1:36:59 You spend all day in meetings and calls and meeting all this stuff, whatever. Like it’s very mentally complex. Like, how do you do this? I started thinking about it and I said, well, you know what? I work out every morning.

1:37:09 It’s the only time where no one bothers me when I listen to a podcast, Music, no music, whatever, right? I run every day. I run very far. I run very fast. That’s my meditation, right?

1:37:22 Is I’m, I’m moving, I’m sweating. I, I, I’m, I’m clearing my mind. And so from 1 standpoint, there’s a meditative component to exercising, right? It’s physiologically better to move and sweat and get your heart rate going and blood pumping and all that kind of stuff. And so it helps your mental acuity. It helps you kind of figure out problems, right? I talk in the book about there’s research that shows if you go outside and you walk, walking forward outside is actually proven to help your brain make connections it otherwise wouldn’t make.

1:37:51 And therefore because of the blood pumping and those connections, etcetera, you get ideas you wouldn’t get sitting inside at a desk. But then also there’s a mental toughness standpoint. If you go and you do hard workouts, you don’t have to do it every day, but maybe once a week or twice a week. You’re training your mental toughness, your resilience, your ability to survive in some sort of physical pain that makes you better at work or in a relationship. It teaches you different things about yourself. And so this idea that physical exercises is good for you physically, obviously, but actually most exercise, if viewed correctly, is psychological training to make you better throughout the day.

1:38:26 And so once you start to realise that, I think it’s better for people because they say to themselves, I’m not going to work out this morning because of the physical benefits. I’m going to work out because it’s the only way that I can address the mental benefits. And then there is motivation for you to actually go work out every single day and keep some sort of routine and, you know, kind of fulfil your physical goals. But you’re doing it because you understand that there’s this mental component.

1:38:53 And then the last thing that I’ve started to tell young people is if you want to be a great investor, if you want to be a great entrepreneur, one of the biggest inputs is time in the market, time building your company or time with a portfolio. The reason why Warren Buffett is so rich because he’s literally 90 years old, he’s just been compounding for I think it’s like 78 years or 80 years. That helps a lot, right? When compounding is working for you for 80 years, a lot of people don’t make it to 80, let alone 9293, whatever he is. And so if you want to have a great portfolio at the end of your life, one of the best inputs you can have is make sure you make it there, make sure you’re healthy, make sure you have longevity.

1:39:33 You do that when you’re younger. There’s not really an emergency, you know, button that you press when you’re 6570 years old and you got heart problems. That’s going to be the, you know, silver bullet bullet solution. It is the compounding of your health habits. And so there’s a argument that working out is actually good for your health, but it’s also good for your investment portfolio.

1:39:53 When you start to tie these things together, I think that it all shows again, what type of person are you and what is the type of life that you want to live?

1:40:02 Brian Rose: Love it, you say? Live your life as a documentary. What does that mean?

1:40:06 Anthony Pompliano: You’re doing it.

1:40:07 You said you want to do epic stuff, right? You want to go and challenge yourself. You don’t want London Real to look like next year, what it looks like today. If somebody was to follow you around with a camera and you sat on your couch all day, that wouldn’t be a very interesting documentary, right? If it’s a way better documentary to say, look at this guy, he’s been doing this amazing podcast for 13 years.

1:40:26 He’s got followers all around the world. He’s going to run for mayor. Here’s the struggle. He’s starting out. No one knows who he is.

1:40:32 He’s going to enter into politics for the first time. He’s got to create his policies. He’s got to go onto the street, he’s got to be able to campaign. He’s got like, you can just tell the story already. It is much more of an interesting documentary. And then you look at it in hindsight and you say, man, that was fun.

1:40:47 Whether I win or not, I enjoyed it. I lived life. I had this great experience is my version of an extraordinary life. And so live your life like a documentary is kind of this reminder If you’re living a boring existence, just sitting on your couch eating bad food, watching Netflix again, doing it every once in awhile is great. Doing it every day probably not really going to create that extraordinary life.

1:41:09 And so just pretend that that camera is following you and go out there and live your life. You’ll probably end up doing a lot of stuff you wouldn’t do otherwise.

1:41:20 Brian Rose: Yeah, I love it. We’re all going to die. What’s the point there?

1:41:24 Anthony Pompliano: I learned this when I was 20 years old. I deployed to Taji, Iraq, about 12 miles or so north of Baghdad. It’s the only story I’ve ever talked about publicly. But on that day it was the first time that my Army unit and I were attacked.

1:41:40 Unfortunately there was AUS soldier that died that day. And at 20 years old, it’s a pretty formative experience because you realise, wait a minute, this is a guy who wasn’t part of our unit. He showed up, Sergeant Mark Baum, and he was there to help us. We’re a pretty selfless act to come. While we needed help, him and his unit showed up.

1:41:59 He didn’t go home that day. And when you realise that, you say, you know, I got a new lease on life because I am going home today. But more importantly is that I’m going to have the same fate as he is. Today was his day. One day it’s going to be my day.

1:42:13 And it took me years later to read Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations. And in it, he talks a lot about coming to terms with your mortality. And it just struck me. I said, Oh my God, this is something that’s been going on for thousands of years. At some point, every man and woman comes to terms with I’m going to die. Some of them don’t come to terms with it until they’re on their deathbed and moments away.

1:42:33 Some of them come to terms with it when they’re much younger. It’s one of the greatest gifts I ever got in life was I realised that at 20 years old. Because then, as I said earlier, it’s to drive my motorcycle too fast. It’s to do all kinds of crazy stuff. It’s because I knew I was going to die and I wanted to fit all of life I could into the 435. And so a lot of it came from the fact that I realised we’re all going to die.

1:42:54 And it’s morbid, we don’t want to talk about it, kind of scary, it’s overwhelming, but it’s going to happen. And so you can either ignore reality or not. But once you realise that you’re going to die, all of a sudden you care about a lot less things. What that person that lives down the street is saying about you, who cares when you’re dead? No one’s going to remember who you are. No one’s going to remember who they are, right? Go live your life, enjoy your stuff, do what you want to do in life.

1:43:20 And I just think, again, kind of feeding back into like, what is an extraordinary life? You may live an extraordinary life while you’re alive, but once you die, it’s over. And so if you know there’s a finite time, there’s a finite end to this thing, then pack as much as you can into it and you’re going to end up being in a much better position, much happier, I think, than if you didn’t.

1:43:40 Brian Rose: You know, one of the beauties of living in London is, is I get to walk by a lot of graveyards and there’s one right near me called Bunhill Graveyard. And I love walking through that graveyard. It’s got bodies in there for hundreds and hundreds of years, some from the plague.

1:43:54 And you know, Anthony, when I walk by there, I always think to myself, what are those people thinking in in the ground? Are they thinking that they wish they had another day on the sofa? Are they thinking that they’re worried about what other people say about them or they thinking that they had one more shot to do that crazy thing, or they wishing they had one more hour or one more day to shoot for that goal? And so I don’t know, it’s a little bit twisted, but I always find it really inspiring to walk through there and think, you know, what do they wish they would have done? And based on that, what am I going to do that normally I might not do, knowing that I’m going to be there myself soon? So yeah, that’s one of the benefits of living in an old city like this.

1:44:39 Anthony, you mentioned your military experience. What did you get from that? Because I didn’t always know you were in the military. But now that I know it, I, I see things in you that I’m like, OK, it, it, some of your persona feels military, maybe your efficiency, maybe your structure. But like, what did you get from that?

1:44:57 Anthony Pompliano: I think there’s a couple of things that you know, immediately in hindsight, I know I learned. I probably didn’t know I was learning it at the time. 1 is we’re all going to die.

1:45:07 The second thing is the military really exposed me, especially in Iraq. You know, we see on the news all the time war-torn countries and and all stuff. Seeing it first hand, understanding the intricacies, imagine handing a gun to a 20 year old kid, an 18 year old kid, a 22 year old kid and saying go out there by the way people are trying to kill you and if you make the wrong decision, we’re going to Monday morning quarterback you. It’s a lot of complexity. There’s a lot of challenges to this, right? You know, war is not ugly.

1:45:33 There are no winners. And so people will look at the death and destruction that is created by one side of the war, but they also don’t realise what the mental scars are or the health, the kind of, you know, issues or the death that is suffered by both sides. And so when I see things like Russia and Ukraine, or I see things like what’s happening in Israel, etcetera, is again, humans are humans. And so there is right and wrong in the world. And it’s important to call out right and wrong.

1:46:02 But also there are no winners when it comes to war. And so it then begs the question, how do you prevent war? I always love Marcus Luttrell, the Navy SEAL, who is a kind of memorialised his entire story in the movie, The Lone Survivor. He was one of four Navy Seals on a mountain. Three of them end up dying.

1:46:21 He has this kind of, you know, almost unbelievable journey to survival. And he’s giving a speech this one time and he says that he was talking to politician and he said, hey, your job is to never send me anywhere. You’re a diplomat. Use every tool you got to solve the problem. Because by the time you get to me, I only know one thing. I bring death, destruction and hell and fury with me and I do my job.

1:46:45 If you send me, it’s because you failed. I am the last resort. And I’m good at my job, but I am the last resort. And I always think about that right, is people are so quick to say, let’s use the military. Let’s let’s deploy men and women overseas.

1:47:00 But instead, if we actually had more focus on the diplomacy, on the ability to negotiate with both our friends and our folks and be able to prevent war, how much better off would we be? Again, it’s not always possible, but having the military strength to deter people and also having the diplomacy to be able to negotiate with people is pretty important. Another thing I think I learned is leadership, and I was fortunate enough to go to a specific leadership school in the military. I really took away a lot from that. But you didn’t have to go to those leadership schools in the military to pick up on simple things. You know, the leaders of a team eat last. You want your men and women to eat first. There’s this great book by Pete Blaber. He’s the former Delta Force commanders called The Mission, The Men and Me.

1:47:47 And what he talks about, he goes, the mission comes first, comes before my men. You always complete the mission. But next comes my men. And then only last do I service myself. And so that mentality of, again, collectivism, the ability for us to rally together and sacrifice for each other at the goal of accomplishing the mission is kind of embedded in everything the military does.

1:48:07 So I think it’s those types of lessons, but then there’s a human element to it. You know, I was fortunate enough I deployed with a lot of guys who are very different than me. They grew up in Western Pennsylvania. A lot of them live in areas that I didn’t even understand until I met them. A lot of them were older than I was when I deployed. And so I got to see the whole different aspect of life. I was in college when I deployed. These guys had mortgages.

1:48:29 I’m worried about what frat parties on Saturday and they’re worried about how am I going to feed my kids Way, way different way of viewing the world. So I was able to grow up much faster than most people. But on top of that, the things that they cared about, things that they did on a day-to-day basis, right, was very different than the world I grew up in. And so when you put yourself in those environments, you just naturally start to be more empathetic. You start to be more understanding that there’s different views of the world, there’s different things that happen. And so I think that if we can take young people and put them in different environments, even if it’s for short periods of time, there’s a lot of benefit that comes. It’s hard to pinpoint, say I learned X or I learned Y, but what you start to do is you start to gain understanding. And I think that the more understanding we have, the more ability we have to see that not everyone is like me, not everyone thinks like I do, not everyone has the experiences that I do.

1:49:14 The more that it starts to bring us together rather than pull us apart. And really, if you look at a lot of what we talked about today, that probably could serve us pretty well in terms of creating solutions kind of feeds into this idea of competing, not complaining. You know, a lot of people complain in the world, but the best people I know, both in terms of success but also happiness, they compete. They compete to be a better father, they compete to be a better friend.

1:49:38 They compete to be a Better Business person. They compete to be a better investor. And so if you do that over and over and over again, you end up actually in a situation where you’re self improving and you’re pulling the people around you, that leadership component, you’re pulling those people up with you. And if you do that enough times, then everyone around you gets better. You get better.

1:49:56 And if you do it with great skill and I think enough reach, you can actually help change entire communities. And that’s really what we need, right? Going back to, you know, that City Council member may be more important than the president of the White House. How many people in that City Council are really doing things that are best for their community versus doing what’s best for them? Every city’s different, every person’s different, but the more people we can get that are working towards the collective good, I think the better off we’ll be.

1:50:23 Brian Rose: Yeah, super powerful stuff.

1:50:24 And you said in the book, the best response to failure is hard work. And I guess that’s your way of saying just get out there and compete as a response to, you know, not complaining. It’s wild. I just had a conversation with Colonel Douglas McGregor, who spent some time in Iraq, and he just said to me he was talking about war crimes and he paused and he said all war is a war crime. And it was wild for me to see a seasoned military guy come to the same observation that you that you just made. He also said at the end when I was asking about the election, he said people need to save themselves. They need to stop trying to get one of these people to save them and they need to go out there and save themselves. And just sounds alike a lot what you’re saying. Just a couple final things, Anthony, How did you become such a great speaker?

1:51:05 You know, people see you on your podcast or on CNBC and or even here. I mean, you really, I think have mastered the art of communication and I think it’s becoming a lost art in this day and age. And I was wondering how you did it? Was it intentional? Do you think it’s one of the most important things for young men and women to learn?

1:51:27 And then how would you say that they go about achieving that?

1:51:30 Anthony Pompliano: I had an advantage in life. I grew up in a family of five boys. And so frankly, we just talk shit to each other every single day, all day long for our entire life. And so if you want to convince four other people to do something every day, all day long, you got to get pretty good at communicating.

1:51:45 You got to be pretty persuasive. And so, you know, unfortunately people can’t replicate that. Mostly it was just kind of a, you know, result of the environment and, and just practise and kind of cause repetition. But with that said, I also think that, you know, however good I was at communicating, maybe when I was 1819 years old and you know, went off to college, etcetera. I got much better at it over time because I have the podcast, I, I constantly communicate online and I test ideas and I try to understand how do I communicate this idea as concisely as possible? How do I communicate it in a way that is memorable or is shareable, right?

1:52:20 Those things really are kind of practise and iteration. And so I think that anyone is able to do this if you are kind of too intentional, it comes off as very inauthentic. But a lot of what we talked today, the reason why I have such kind of high conviction on it, because I thought about these things for a long time. I’ve written about them, I’ve talked to them, I’ve gotten feedback, all that kind of stuff. And so I think that communication really is a byproduct of just how much work have you put in. And it’s really just, if you want to be good at communicating, how many people a day do you talk to, right? Like it’s, you know, really simple. You sit behind your computer all day and you’re like, I want to get better at communicating.

1:52:55 Well, like, maybe the best thing you can do is like just walk outside and start talking to people, right? That, that might be the first step. But I do think that there’s probably people who look at the way I communicate and they’re like, hey, you know what, actually, he could be way more polished, probably say, umm, too much or, you know, curse too much or, or whatever. And so it’s always, how do you get better? And you look for it, especially as you start to have any degree of success. You look for the people who say, Hey, you’re doing an OK job, but let me tell you how you can get better rather than people who just walk around and they’re like, you’re amazing at this. And so I think that that’s another piece of it is as I’ve learned how to communicate over time, a lot of it was trial and error.

1:53:32 But every once in a while, somebody will say something to me. And I hope that I’m intellectually humble enough to say, you know what, you’re right that I, I did do that wrong. How do, how do you think I should do in the future? Oh, that that’s a good idea. OK, I’m going to try to implement that next time.

1:53:44 You know, I’m doing an interview or I’m interviewing somebody or whatever. And so it’s just constantly trying to find where is room for improvement and then go follow that.

1:53:54 Brian Rose: That’s great advice, Anthony. How can people get a copy of the book and then how how also can they learn more about you, professional Capital Management, follow you on socials? What’s the best way?

1:54:05 Anthony Pompliano: The book How to Live an extraordinary Life, available everywhere, probably Amazon, Barnes and Noble, wherever for me, if, if people want to, you know, just learn more, I think about what I write on a day-to-day basis for financial markets, they can just go to pompletterpompletter.com. And then Twitter’s probably the best social media just at a Pompliano is the Twitter handle. So I really appreciate you doing this and been a fan of the show for a very long time.

1:54:31 So pretty cool to to be talking to you.

1:54:34 Brian Rose: Awesome man, thank you so much. Are you having more kids?

1:54:39 Anthony Pompliano: I’ll let you know. My wife and I are discussing now and depending on the day, whatever our kids are doing, as you probably know, some days we’re like, we should have a million. Other days we’re like, Oh my God, there’s like a a zoo around here.

1:54:51 Brian Rose: Yeah. You got to write some more letters if you have some more kids.

1:54:54 It’s awesome. The book is called How to Live an Extraordinary Life. Pick that up in bookstores, Amazon, etcetera. Follow this man on X on letter com for your newsletter, which I think a quarter million people plus get, which is amazing. Yeah, I just want to say thanks.

1:55:08 You’re just a huge voice, a really needed voice, a really unique voice out there because you know, you’re in your 30s, but you also can speak the language of both worlds. You know, the D Jens listen to you and the Tapiaros and Scaramucci’s and Uskos listen to you as well and all the folks in mainstream financial as well. And I don’t know, you’re very unique. And I, when we were getting into blockchain heavy in 21, I was watching your shows all the time and your live broadcast and it really helped me a lot.

1:55:36 So thanks so much for what you do. Next time, let’s do this in person in London or in New York and just wishing you all the best.

1:55:52 Anthony Pompliano: Thank you so much. I appreciate it.

1:55:56 Brian Rose: All right, everybody, take care. We’ll see you next time on London Real. Bye.